X-rated
movie, The (alleged). Once Joan's brief chorus gig with Katherine Emerine
in Springfield, Missouri, closed in 1923, she needed money to get to Chicago.
According to JB, Joan made a brief "vignette" for
a vending machine distributor named Lionel West. A friend of Joan's brotherHal, Greg Rhinelander, saw it later and said:

It wasn't a striptease and
it wasn't lewd. She was just a brunette gal dancing naked... It was in the collection
of the owner of Photomaton, a company that distributed those little mechanical
peep shows. It was a Charleston-type twenties dance that couldn't have lasted
more than a couple of minutes... This wasn't porno.

Other stories
have floated around that there was a stag film with Joan called The
Casting Couch. In JCB, author Thomas says that both Louis B. Mayer and MGM
attorney Robert Rubin viewed the film and concluded that the actress was not
Joan. Thomas also quotes Arthur Knight, a film historian for Playboy:

Playboy
pays a lot of money to acquire pornographic films; you'd think that if a Joan
Crawford stag reel existed, one would have been offered for sale. None has.
Furthermore, I spent a week at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana,
which has probably the largest collection of pornographic movies. I saw none
with Joan Crawford. I don't believe such a film exists.